Each new group of settlers felt compelled to rename the place in their own tongue, and each of them drew inspiration from it looking like a hump. Cultures that passed through the region added their own word for “hill”: tor from Old English, pen from the Celtic, how from Norse, and finally hill from modern English.

So the next time you say “Torpenhow Hill,” you’ll also think “Hill-hill-hill Hill,” and you’re most welcome.

Curious what his robot vacuum cleaner could do, our hero tried to run custom software on it. With a little help from AI coding tools, he managed to connect to the machine and start sending it commands. Thanks to a software design decision that can only be described as “optimistic”, the secret key that allowed to talk to his own robot was also shared between thousands of other devices — so every single one of his instruction was broadcast to the rather sizable fleet.

I guess that’s just the world we live in. We connect more things to the internet, we run code that we don’t understand aaand — some of the result is bound to be funny.

(Reddit)

“That is not only not right; it is not even wrong.”

It sounds pedantic—and to be fair, it sounds like the kind of insult only a physicist can deliver with a straight face—, but Pauli is making an important point here.

Some claims are wrong not because they contradict evidence, but because they can’t be tested at all. And that distinction is relevant, both in the field of 20th-century physics, as well as when you’re debating on social media today.

Falsifiable statements are easy enough to handle: we can test them, debate them, and make corrections if necessary. But other claims seem immune to contradiction. Even when said claims don’t hold up, they still manage to slip through scrutiny.

You know the ones: A conspiracy theorist might say, “The government is run by aliens”, or a wellness coach might say “Your energy is blocked.” You can’t exactly disprove these statements, but that’s not because they are true. It’s because they were crafted to be impossible to test.

Conspiracy theories take this one step further even, where the lack of evidence becomes part of the proof: “A secret group controls everything, and the reason there’s no evidence is because they’re powerful enough to hide it.” Any document disproving the claim is clearly disinformation put out by the group. The idea can’t ever be challenged because it absorbs the challenge into itself.

Even if people make these statements with good intentions, unfalsifiable claims aren’t harmless: they waste time, make people anxious, and generate debates that divide families. In an age where attention is currency, the unfalsifiable claim is a weapon that we need to armor against.

The good news is that there is such armor. We don’t have to disprove every wild claim.

Instead, we can start with a better question: “What would it take to prove this wrong? And if the answer is “nothing could,” then you’ve found the tell: It’s not an argument. And not only is it not an argument, but it’s a mere smokescreen from which you’re free to step away.

Knowing when not to engage in debate is a skill in itself, so spotting the unfalsifiable helps us conserve energy for conversations that actually require our attention.

My confidence lasted about five minutes. I sprinted, scrambled, and sweated at every point with my tongue sticking out, while my opponent stayed calm and controlled. He barely stepped away from the center of the court, while making me run for all four corners. All my chaotic gameplay, against him moving with surgically precise shots.

Anyways, long story short, he beat me rather badly without even breaking a sweat. But where there’s nothing to earn, there may be something to learn — I saw that he trained specifically to make the best use of his strengths. And I finally realized that working harder won’t work for me for forever. Strategy beats hustle, and the real challenge is to find the smarter game to play.

And in fact, working harder usually only solves the wrong problem faster.

Imagine a lifeguard who spots someone drowning offshore. The shortest path is a straight line, but it’s not the fastest. You can run faster on sand than you can swim in water, so the optimal route involves running most of the way along the shore before swimming the final stretch.

My squash game is a practical demonstration of this classic physics problem: I was the lifeguard who started swimming straight out, and my opponent was running along the shore first.

People instinctively trust brute-force effort because we can see it. We can feel our muscles burn, count the hours worked, even enjoy the sweat. This makes “working hard” feel like real progress, unlike the often invisible work of acquiring skill, or developing strategy.

And of course, our brain needs to justify the effort we put in: We tend to value things more highly if we’ve struggled to achieve them. Even if our hard work leads to a mediocre outcome, we might still overvalue the effort itself, convincing ourselves it was the right approach and maybe we just needed more of it to actually succeed.

We’re also wired for mental shortcuts. As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, when faced with a complex question like “What’s the best way to succeed?”, our brains substitute an easier one: “Am I working hard enough?” This heuristic effort feels immediate and actionable—it’s simpler to double down than to step back and potentially change course.

But sometimes (and rather regularly), taking a step back we shall.

(And I guess all I really want this article to say is that I swam a 10K Marathon. There, now you have it.)

Some of you know that for almost ten years now, I’ve grounded myself with a weekly habit: swimming 2k at least once a week. Rain or shine, I’ll find a pool and start counting the laps. A moving meditation, more so than jogging, since swimming doesn’t allow for podcasts and similar distractions.

Somewhere along the way I came across the idea of the Misogi Challenge: Once a year, you take on something so difficult and intimidating that it’s basically 50-50 whether you succeed or fail. And since my swimming habit is about to hit its first decade mark, I decided that it would be quite adequate for my first Misogi to be my first midlife crisis marathon.

I know, the Misogi challenge also sounds a little like a new-age wellness fad, but that’s the way it always goes.

If you also get your cultural references from Columbo episodes, then it won’t be a surprise that jogging in the 1970s was mostly dismissed as something for eccentrics.

And now, jogging is such an ordinary activity. Even my mom does it on Saturdays. In the same vein, in the 2010s, meditation was treated with the same suspicion, and now it’s a billion-dollar industry backed by clinical studies. Sounds like Misogi could be next in line, you heard it here first (or second, or what do I know, maybe you’ve known it all along).

In Shinto, purification is the starting point of almost every ritual. One of the most well-known methods is Misogi, which traditionally involves standing under a waterfall, bathing in a river, or using some other form of water immersion to wash away impurities—spiritual, or otherwise.

And of course, quite like mindfulness meditation, Misogi too has been reimagined to fit modern Western lifestyles. What began as a spiritual practice is now framed as a test of resilience, and even a form of self-discovery. The more modern version of the Misogi Challenge looks like this: Once a year, do something so difficult for one day that it reshapes the rest of your year.

The original Hummer was a symbol of excess and masculinity in the 2000s. A civilian spin on a military vehicle, it was massive, aggressive, and wildly out of place anywhere it was sold. It looked especially absurd in cities—particularly on the small, centuries-old streets like the ones we have in London—but even seeing one sitting in a North American driveway pretty much meant that someone had chosen to think differently.

A Hummer was, by design, the largest it could be while still legally considered to be a car. But a vehicle that wide and that heavy struggled to fit the roads of the time, often becoming a nuisance in the parking lot.

Fast forward 20 years, and the 2000s Hummer H2 wouldn't even stick out anymore. Cars have grown out of proportion, and run-of-the-mill electric SUVs have now reached the size and weight of their once-absurd forerunner. Our little two-lane street in London has effectively become a one-way road, thanks to the behemoths parked on either side. Where five of the old Minis would fit, now it's just two of these large things. At least the original Hummer came in fun colors and not only gray.

These new “family-friendly,” “future-facing” “cars” pretty much cancel out a decade's worth of progress in per-vehicle fuel efficiency. And the odd thing is: Even their owners don't seem to really love them. Unlike the Hummer H2, the new SUVs don't seem to have made it on any garage posters. So who's buying them?

The Safety Arms Race

People don't judge things in isolation. Size, value, and status only matter in context. When you see a massive SUV parked on the street, you compare it to the other cars next to it. A Hummer blends in at a parking lot full of other Hummers. If all other cars are from the 70s, even a modest modern crossover starts to look like a tank. This tendency is known as “anchoring,” and it shapes everything in our lives—from how we dress to when we wake up in the morning, all the way down to how safe we feel behind the wheel.

As roads fill up with bigger vehicles, smaller ones start to feel vulnerable, even if safety data doesn't back that up. People move up the size ladder to feel safer, which only makes the small cars look smaller. It's a classic arms race, now fought with the crumple zone.

In game theory, the "best move" for each player often depends on what they expect others to do. The safety argument for larger vehicles creates what game theorists call a “classic coordination problem.” Each individual’s decision to buy a bigger car is perfectly rational, but when everyone makes the same “rational” choice, the collective outcome is worse for each individual.

If everyone else is driving tanks, the rational move indeed is to get your own. But once the majority of drivers upsize, the game will unstoppably head in a direction nobody would freely choose. A Nash equilibrium, or a situation in which no individual can improve their position by changing strategy, lands us in a world where everyone drives vehicles larger than anyone actually needs.

Big cars are making cities less safe: They obscure smaller cars, increase pedestrian fatalities, strain city infrastructure, and make streets harder to navigate. But once the larger-car flywheel is in motion, there's no clear way to reverse it. No single driver is incentivized to break the cycle, so external regulation is due: Expect road limits, weight taxes, slow speed zones, and pedestrianized streets.

Brighter Futures

Self-driving vehicles could be our best shot at ending the cycle of ever-larger cars. When you remove personal ownership, you also remove many of the psychological levers that push us toward these oversized machines. Fleet operators can make more rational decisions—optimizing for battery life, uptime, efficiency, and safety—based on real numbers rather than on mere feelings.

Even better, in a comprehensive review, transportation researchers Joschka Bischoff and Michal Maciejewski estimated that a single autonomous vehicle (AV) could replace up to eleven privately owned cars in an urban fleet. Parking demand follows suit. Separate research by university professors Wenwen Zhang and Kaidi Wang found that shared AVs in Atlanta could reduce parking demand by as much as 90%, which would free up vast amounts of city space for people to use.

Once autonomous fleets reach critical mass, car ownership in a city could start to feel as quaint as owning a horse. The shift may happen faster than anyone expects, but in the meantime, and for the love of all that is holy: Buy these massive machines if you must, but park them outside our quaint little street.

While he was a brilliant thinker on his own, Erdős preferred not to work alone. So much so that he didn’t always have a home, rather, he packed his bags and spent much of his life traveling from one colleague’s home to another. Always ready to dive into a new problem with a new group, and greeting each with his famous line: “My brain is open.”

By the time he died in 1996, he had co-authored around 1,500 papers—more than any other mathematician on record. His network spanned over 500 collaborators and linked more than 130,000 mathematicians. As mathematician Béla Bollobás once put it, Erdős had “an amazing ability to match problems with people,” connecting the right minds to the right challenges.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear, but research shows that teams consistently outperform individuals across disciplines, especially when solving complex problems.

On the other side: networks can become echo chambers where bad ideas spread just as easily as good ones. Group dynamics can also stifle dissent, making radical breakthroughs harder. And when too many people share the credit, participation can drop off.

The hard thing isn’t joining networks—it’s knowing when to lean on them, and when to step away and work alone. And so we arrive at the million dollar question: is success determined more by your talent, or rather, wherever you sit on a network?

Sociologist Ronald Burt’s research on “structural holes” indeed suggests that the most innovative people aren’t always the smartest, but rather the best positioned—the ones bridging gaps between disconnected groups. In a study of 17,000 scientists, those who connected previously separate fields produced the highest-impact work, regardless of their raw talent. Simply put: Being in the right network multiplies the reach of your ideas.

Trying to explain an idea that you think you understand, only to watch the explanation fall apart with every word you speak, is an absolutely gut-wrenching feeling.

Unlike written exams, where visual learners may be able to parrot back memorized notes that they barely understand, an oral test demands creative thinking in real time. When presented with a conjecture, students not only need to recall relevant definitions and theorems, but they also need to apply them—sometimes in ways they never anticipated.

That brings us to the obvious question: How does one prepare for such an exam? Or, to put it another way: How can you tell if you’ve studied enough to truly understand a subject? Or, to rephrase yet again, this time in the words of Monty Python’s John Cleese, “If you’re very, very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very, very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you are.”

And indeed, as psychologist David Dunning, one of the discoverers of the Dunning-Kruger effect, describes in his book Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself: “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent [...] The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

However “obvious” something seems today, every little thing had to be invented once, including the tiniest detail you can think of.

Before someone came up with the idea of a corridor, people lived in houses where rooms opened from other rooms like you see in museums today. Go ahead and say duh — but when the first Roman patrician built corridors in a villa, it was just as forward looking in their time, as Singapore’s sustainable breathing walls are in ours.

You’d think that something as basic and ubiquitous as the equal sign, one of the world’s most recognized symbols and one of the most frequently used concepts in mathematics, is as old as time itself. But you’d be surprised to learn that it was introduced as late as 1557, by the Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who, as rumor has it, came up with the “emoji” because he got tired of writing “is equal to” all the time.

Big or small, every feature of our world had to be invented at some point. Sometimes they’re reinvented again and again—which is how we got the phrase “reinventing the wheel.” (Excuse the nit: technically, what we’re reinventing most of the time is the axle.)

Innovation as broccoli

During grocery shopping, I sometimes shout “Let’s buy a fractal,” and I don’t even mean it as a joke.

If you look at Romanesco broccoli (some may call it Romanesco cauliflower), you can see that it really is a naturally occurring fractal, with its buds forming a logarithmic spiral that displays self-similarity at various scales.

Setting this aside aside, in his book Scale, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West draws an interesting parallel between the fractal nature of innovation and biological systems.

The idea is that innovations, like fractals, show self-similarity at different scales. Just as a small branch of a tree resembles the whole tree’s structure, small innovations often mirror the pattern of larger, breakthrough discoveries. Each innovation creates new possibilities for further ones, branching out in a fractal-like pattern of development.

Time machine spinoffs

Wells’ Time Machine didn’t introduce the concept of time travel—it merely put it in a new context. While earlier stories had flirted with the idea via dreams or mystical forces, Wells married the idea with science and engineering, giving time travel a plausible framework in the Industrial Age.

This shift was a kind of cognitive “phase change”—a point where scattered ideas suddenly align into a coherent new concept. And from that seed sprouted countless variations, each echoing the original blueprint while morphing into something new.

The fractal nature of innovation becomes evident in how subsequent authors built upon Wells’ framework. Each new iteration—from Asimov’s temporal mechanics to Zemeckis’ DeLorean—represents a similar pattern, preserving the core concept of mechanical time travel while adding new layers of complexity and interpretation. Just as each small bud in a head of Romanesco broccoli follows the same mathematical principles as the whole, each new time machine story carries the imprint of Wells’ original vision.

Which takes me to at least one breakthrough that emerged from nowhere.

E.T. Bell, when writing about the 16th-century mathematician John Napier, notes:

“The invention of logarithms came on the world as a bolt from the blue. No previous work had led up to it, foreshadowed it, or heralded its arrival. It stands isolated, breaking in upon human thought abruptly without borrowing from the work of other intellects or following known lines of mathematical thought.”

Did someone say time travel?

(Much of this post appeared first in Psychology Today.)

Like that guy who was charged with fraud because his AI shopping app didn’t have any AI in it.

It’s the stone soup story all over, because of course no startup has amazing tech on day one. In the spirit of “fake it till you make it”, founders tend to skimp on the expensive features until they have a sense for product-market fit. So instead of “real AI” they may start with building a simple interface—the stone!—and hire humans behind the scenes to do the work that AI is supposed to handle.

This manual work is meant to be temporary until the dev team catches up on real AI stuff and the soup is ready to be served. But then somehow the marketing material gets confused with what investors are told, and this slippery slope ends with the Department of Justice knocking on the door.

And all the same time the story could have gone totally well: the dev team delivers the real AI stuff, everybody makes a ton of money and the founders are celebrated for their ingenuity. They write books about building product on a shoestring budget. People eat delicious soup.

Anyways, this is a long way of saying that we should only judge whether a decision is good or bad before the outcome is known. Solving problems with the best available technology is generally a good idea, lying about said technology is a bad idea, no matter who gets caught.

How bad is a bad idea

I’m sure everyone can agree though that gambling with company money is a bad idea, regardless of whether someone wins or loses. Yet, the day Frederick Smith took FedEx’s last $5,000 to Las Vegas in 1974, he probably wasn’t thinking about such niceties as the “ethical implications” of gambling with employee paychecks. It was an act of survival. The company was bleeding $1 million a month, fuel costs were skyrocketing, and no investor would touch them.

When Smith returned with $27,000 in blackjack winnings—just enough to keep the company’s airplanes in the air for another week—he became a part of start-up folklore. Today, the FedEx story is often celebrated in business schools as an example of entrepreneurial grit and determination.

But really, what if he had lost?

If I may say so myself

As Jonathan Baron and John Hershey explain in their 1988 paper Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation, people may hold themselves responsible for both good and bad luck, becoming smug in their success or self-reproachful in their failure.

White-collar criminals can do just enough mental gymnastics to avoid ever having to see themselves as dishonest people, which is just as well—part of a CEO’s job is to be good at building self-serving narratives.

A chief executive’s true performance is quite difficult to measure. Unlike say, a sales representative who can point to concrete business won or an engineer who ships specific features, a CEO’s impact is often based on their reactions to external factors. Some of their most consequential decisions—like entering a new market or shutting down investments in a product line—might not reveal their true value for years. And in the absence of clear metrics, an executive will be measured by the strength of their story.

This kind of selective accountability is quite useful when writing quarterly reports or public statements. Corporate success becomes less about measurable outcomes and more about constructing compelling leadership narratives that satisfy our need for simple, hero-driven explanations.

All things being equal, outcome bias will drive public perception, so if you’re a CEO who must do something bad—at least try to succeed at it.

Schwartz argues, I’m told, that the abundance of choice in modern society has become a source of distress rather than some kind of liberation.

When faced with too many options—like choosing a career path, someone to marry, or a Netflix show to watch—we often end up paralyzed by fear. We procrastinate on decisions to avoid making the wrong choice, and even after we finally do decide, we’re haunted by the thought that maybe one of the other options would have turned out better.

This is both a bug and a feature.

Some of the most successful companies in the world have recognized an opportunity in this choice paralysis and have made a conscious effort to limit their offerings.

In-N-Out Burger has a stubbornly minimal menu that hasn’t changed since the 1950s. And when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, one of his first moves was to slash the product line by two-thirds.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone is not to ask them too many questions.

Like, in Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn it’s not the urn that gets smashed but Ai WeiWei.

Everything in the Middle finger series would have a different number of fingers, and probably none of them exactly five.

I guess the chair thing can stay as-is.

Why is there a new one? Where are all the older posts? Who the hell are you anyway, I followed a link here for some decade-old javascript code!

All excellent questions, dear reader.

In hindsight I know why I hated the previous wimagguc: it was created to chase popularity. As dumb as it gets in a world where content is free and nobody needs yet another internet guy’s blend opinion: I was posting things I hoped would get me hired (or before I met B: things that get me laid — double lol!!)

Smartypants garbage, in a know-it-all style, why would you even.

Why is there a new one? Because I hated the old blog. Where are all the older posts? Nowhere, they were all crap. Where’s the javascript stuff? LLM yourself into a new one.

What about the forests? Nope.

*

The invention of logarithms came on the world as a bolt from the blue. No previous work had led up to it, foreshadowed it, or heralded its arrival. It stands isolated, breaking in upon human thought abruptly without borrowing from the work of other intellects or following known lines of mathematical thought.

— Lord Moulton on the 300th anniversary of John Napier’s 1614 book Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms

Yes, in this new wimagguc you can expect to read about odd things that I think about odd things that I read about.

The Spartans’ reply set a new standard for tough talk; they sent back a single word: “If.”

Competitive sport athletes also often engage in mental games, trying to unnerve opponents before a matchup, which is well within their right: no sport has rules against “intense eye contact” or “showcasing confidence,” so it only makes sense to try to create a little psychological advantage before the competition begins.

In his seminal work, The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey describes a subtle yet powerful psychological tactic that exemplifies this kind of strategy. He notes how merely complimenting an opponent’s technique after a series of exceptionally well-placed serves can paradoxically lead to a decline in their performance. The psychology behind this is fascinating: drawing conscious attention to what was previously an unconscious, fluid motion increases self-awareness, which leads to overthinking, an eventual breakdown in natural rhythm, and—a performance decline.

Two secret agents need to meet for the very first time. They don’t know anything about each other—can’t even be sure that they live in the same hemisphere. They will recognize the other agent when the day comes, but that’s about all.

The spies haven’t previously agreed on anything, and they can’t communicate in any way, neither directly nor indirectly. The deadline for the meeting is one year. Within 12 months, the two agents need to meet without sharing so much as a tweet.

Where and when will they meet? And what would you do if you were one of the agents?

This puzzle is obviously “unsolvable” in a way that no two people will come to the same conclusion. Rather, it is an opportunity to observe creative problem-solving in real-time and to see how candidates talk through different approaches.

To maximize the chance of having a successful meeting, the agents need to think through what they themselves would do in such a situation, as well as imagine what the other agent might do. Since there’s no prior agreement and no knowledge of each other’s whereabouts, their best hope is to increase the probability of a chance meetup by choosing a place and time that most other agents would reasonably think of.

I don’t know much about spies, but I know that when I lived in Berlin, Germany, I only ever met up with friends who specifically came to visit me. On the other hand, when I lived in Manhattan, I only needed to wait, and sooner or later, all my friends from all corners of the world would eventually come by. So, “my” agent would choose New York for the meetup, and if it’s New York, it has to be Times Square, and if it’s Times Square, it’s probably New Year’s Eve. In my line of thought, the whole ball drop thing is just one massive secret agent meetup.